I thought menopause had an end, timed somewhat like puberty. You start it, you reach its zenith, then it fades away to nothing and you are a new, more responsible, rational, peaceful person. But, just like the child’s song, menopause is the event “that never ends. It just goes on and on, my friend.” I’m talking hot flashes.
As I complained about still being victim to these sweaty terrors two years past the date of my last period, a friend mentioned her mother had them for the rest of her life. This seems very unreasonable to me. Rather than be forever reminded of my reproductive system, I should be rewarded somehow for letting my body, month after month, prepare itself for the perpetuation of the species. And, think about how I’ve helped the economy with my endless purchases of feminine products as well as the sheets and underpants I replaced due to periodic overflow. Instead, I get a jail sentence of hot flashes for life.
So, I figure I have anywhere from 30-50 years left of hot flashes, of never knowing if I’ll keep snuggled under a comforter when the wind chill equals my age or if I’ll toss off the blankets in the middle of the night, wishing the furnace would go out. Another generation or two of shedding layers like a lizard, although, unlike that creature, I do not intend to eat the offending garments. Then again, if I did eat them, it would be an excuse to go shopping. Hey, I may be on to something here. Let me get my purse; I feel a hot flash coming on.
I’ve always thought that optimism beats the heck out of pessimism?
Why? How much fun can it be to always expect the worst from others, and the world in general? How can that improve your day or your life?
Now, a recent article in the journal CIRCULATION provides hard evidence that optimism and health are directly connected.
Researchers studied nearly 100,000 women over eight years, tracking how many heart attacks they suffered and how long they lived. Their conclusion? Optimism is good for you! Optimists had a 16% lower risk of having a heart attack. A 2004 study of nearly 1000 elderly Dutch people also found a connection between optimism and a lowered risk of death from heart disease.
So what is the specific mechanism behind these findings? Scientists aren’t sure. If we are predisposed to more positive future expectations, we are more likely to have a can-do attitude about improving our health and our lives. We know there is a better way to live and so we find it.
Pessimists habitually view life as a bunch of setbacks, permanent, unchangable and pervasive, so they feel helpless when things go wrong. These attitudes tend to increase stress and contribute to depression. And depression is never helpful when we need to do some serious problem solving.
However, being optimistic does not mean taking a “don’t worry, be happy” approach. Excessive optimism can lead to making some terrible choices. Believing that bad things cannot happen to you can lead to poor choices like taking the risk of getting a bad infection or smoking because you don’t believe you could ever get lung cancer. Bad things can and do happen to optimists. They just don’t spend their entire lives expecting the worst!
There is new type of resilience training to help convert pessimists to a more positive world view. The key to this training is learning to recognize your natural thought patterns. By identifying your own negative patterns of thought, you can learn to then replace them with more positive alternatives. This training usually requires work with an experienced therapist.
This is exactly the focus of my own practice. As a life change coach, I take my clients’ negative perceptions and turn them on their head. For example, most of us have a gigantic and irrational fear of changing our lives. We fear that change can only lead to bad outcomes. When, in actuality, the only way our lives can improve is to make major changes in our attitudes, our thought patterns and our lives. I know. I’ve changed it all in the past few years!
Over 60 million American men and women suffer from insomnia and sleeplessness each year and recent studies have indicated that the cause may be largely attributed to an underlying hormonal imbalance.
What is Insomnia?
Insomnia is a condition typified by the inability to fall or stay asleep, regardless of how exhausted one may be. Insomnia is often accompanied by other symptoms related to lack of sleep such as foggy thinking, irritability, depression, anxiety and difficulty concentrating. Men and women suffering from insomnia often seek out treatments such as prescription tranquilizers and sleep aides to help them achieve a good night’s sleep. Unfortunately much of the relief is short-lived. It’s important to understand that these medications are only short-term solution to what will ultimately become a more serious condition if left unresolved.
The Connection:
The link between stress and insomnia is really quite simple. The human body contains a “stress hormone” known as cortisol. Cortisol is secreted by the adrenal glands, which are located above the kidneys and then released into our bloodstream as a fight or flight response to stress. It’s the body’s way of keeping us alert during times of peril. Cortisol doesn’t only affect sleep patterns; it also has a negative impact on the metabolism. Cortisol has been linked to adrenal fatigue and weight gain, especially in the abdominal region, at times leading to obesity and medical morbidities such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
Elevated stress levels cause cortisol to wreak havoc on our bodies. Sleep medications are able to mitigate some of the effects of cortisol imbalance such as insomnia, but they don’t relieve stress to reduce the production of cortisol. Stress-reduction techniques such as yoga and meditation paired with balanced nutrition and regular exercise can help to normalize stress levels and in turn properly regulate the production of cortisol. The overproduction of cortisol is classified as a hormonal imbalance and if you think you may be experiencing insomnia, weight gain, fatigue or any other symptoms associated with perimenopause, menopause or andropause (the male menopause), it would be in your best interest to seek out a hormone specialist and consider some simple, minimally invasive blood and saliva tests to determine if a hormonal imbalance is to blame.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Dec 16, 2009 – Older women who take an antidepressant seem to have a small but noteworthy increased risk of stroke and death compared to older women not on an antidepressant medication, a new study shows.
But given that depression itself is a well-established risk factor for early death, heart disease and other ills, the study’s author told Reuters Health, women who need to take these medications shouldn’t see the new findings as a reason to quit.
“Women should not stop taking the medications based on this one study,” Dr. Jordan W. Smoller of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston said in an interview. “What our study does is give patients and doctors a little bit more information about the risk-benefit calculation for older women.”
Antidepressant use in the US has more than quintupled since the early 1990s, Smoller and his colleagues note in their report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
So-called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac and Zoloft are now the first-line treatment for most patients, having replaced older medications called tricyclic antidepressants that may harm the heart.
But little is known about how SSRIs affect heart health, especially in postmenopausal women, who are at increased risk for both heart disease and depression.
To investigate, Smoller and his team looked at 136,293 women participating in the Women’s Health Initiative, an ongoing investigation of women’s health after menopause. None of the women were taking antidepressants at the study’s outset.
During follow-up, which lasted about six years, 5,496 of the study participants started taking antidepressants. While there was no association between antidepressant use and heart disease, the researchers did find that women taking SSRIs had a 45 percent increase in risk of stroke and a 32 percent increase in risk of dying from any cause during follow up, compared with nonusers. Use of older tricyclic antidepressants wasn’t linked to stroke, but it did increase by 67 percent the risk of death during follow up.
It’s important to remember, Smoller said, that these numbers represent “relative risk.” The actual risk of stroke or death for women taking the medications was higher than for women who weren’t using them, but it was still quite small.
For example, he explained, during a given year 0.8 percent of the women not using antidepressants would die, compared to 1.2 percent to 1.4 percent of the women taking the medications. And while 0.3 percent of women who weren’t taking SSRIs would have had a stroke in a typical year, 0.42 percent of women using SSRIs would suffer a stroke annually.
Another limitation to the findings, Smoller added, is that the effect observed with antidepressants could have been related to the fact that women who used the medications had other risk factors that couldn’t be completely accounted for — like being depressed.
The increased risk of death and stroke associated with depression itself, he added, is similar to that seen with the antidepressants used in the study.
No matter what, the researcher said, the relationship between antidepressants and death must be investigated further. “More than 10 percent of Americans are taking antidepressants,” he said. “It’s an important category of medication for us to understand better.”
SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, December 14/28, 2009.
I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about DHEA and how it’s been coined as the “Mother of all Hormones,” but what exactly is DHEA? Where does it come from and what makes it so important?
DHEA (dehydroepiandosterone) is hormone secreted by the two endocrine glands that sit atop the kidneys known as the adrenals or adrenal glands. Experts say that levels of DHEA peak around age 25 and by the time we reach 70, our DHEA levels are only a mere 10% to 20% of what they were when we were in our 20’s. Like all hormones, when DHEA levels begins to decline, the hormonal imbalance can manifest itself into a host of symptoms such as memory loss, loss of muscle mass, bone loss, fatigue and weight gain. This is primarily due to the fact that DHEA is is a prohormone. The hormone serves as a precursor to sex hormones such as estrogen and testosterone and as the production of DHEA tapers off, women and men begin to experience symptoms commonly associated with perimenopause, menopause and andropause (the male menopause).
Being that DHEA is a prohormone, it plays a large role in the production of other hormones – so when DHEA is out of whack, hormonal balance can fall to pieces. If you’re over the age of 35, it’s important to have your hormone levels tested regularly to stay on top of your hormonal health and wellness.
DHEA is said to be the most abundant hormone in humans, having various effects throughout the body. DHEA supplementation has proven to be useful in the treatment of many diseases and conditions such as systemic lupus erythematosus or lupus and has also been found to help lower levels of cholesterol and triglycerides in the blood. Studies have also revealed that DHEA also has preventive qualities – it turns out that adequate levels of DHEA can significantly lower one’s risk of cardiovascular problems including atherosclerosis, stoke and heart attack. DHEA has also been found to restore oxidative balance in diabetic patients. Our delicate interplay of hormones is like a big game of Jenga - you take one block away and the others can come toppling over is you’re not careful.
The thyroid is a little but significant gland that is established in the neck and its function is to make hormones that are controlled by the pituitary gland. TSH, or Thyroid thought-provoking Hormone, is dispatched out by the pituitary gland and outcomes in the output of thyroxin by the thyroid. Thyroxin sways several purposes in the human body, and this encompasses feelings, heart speed, body heat, metabolic process, body heat, skin and hair development, recollection, power, and periods.
Thyroid difficulties and Hormone Replacement Therapy
There are several connections when it arrives to thyroid difficulty and hormone replacement therapy. Firstly, one thing to note is that some of the symptoms of thyroid difficulties can be very alike to those of menopause. This means that women of menopausal age that evolve thyroid difficulties may not even recognize any thing is amiss, putting the symptoms down to menopause. These situation can often arrive about at round the identical time in a woman’s life, and thus if your medical practitioner does not propose it, you may furthermore desire to inquire for a thyroid function check if you proceed to glimpse your medical practitioner for menopausal symptoms. As numerous as 26% of women are identified with reduced thyroid function round the time of menopause.
Another thing to note is that thyroid difficulties can be an outcome of the onset of the menopause. Dr Christiane Northrup cites the work of John R Lee MD when she composes that “there seems to be a cause-and-effect connection between hypothyroidism, in which there are insufficient grades of thyroid hormone, and estrogen supremacy.”
In alignment to decrease the risk of thyroid difficulties or to help alleviate thyroid difficulties HRT patients should double-check that they have their thyroid function checked frequently, as well as her other growth hormone levels. This means at the start of HRT remedy and furthermore in the happening that you change your HRT or change the dosage that you are taking. And granted that despondency is affiliated with thyroid difficulties, if this is not assisted, or becomes poorer after taking HRT, then the broader hormonal image actually desires to be taken into account.
With hypothyroidism the symptoms can encompass despondency, heaviness gain, fatigue, listlessness, itchy and dry skin, dry or thinning hair, sinew cramps, constipation, feeling freezing, junction throbbing, facial enlarging, feeling swings, snoring, faintness, lightweight understanding, difficulties with time span, tiredness, and lack of memory.
In alignment to try and bypass thyroid difficulties hormone replacement patients should search recommendations from their medical practitioner with considers to normal checking while on HRT. And those that seem that they are experiencing the onset of the menopause should furthermore talk to their medical practitioner about thyroid checking to double-check that the symptoms are not getting bewildered and their thyroid difficulty does not proceed undetected.
I think I’ve extolled the virtues of exercising your Kegels before on this blog. Not for nothing have I summarily discombobulated three rabbits and expelled not one, but two IUDs with the strength of my pelvic floor.
However, I have to face facts. I’m getting older. The Menopause is fast approaching along with the possibility of the long arms of her hormone-deficient outriders: loss of libido, vaginal atrophy and bladder weakness.
Having had my children by Caesarean section, I’m very lucky. I don’t automatically wee myself when I sneeze or laugh. However, I have noticed a lack of sensitivity in terms of my pelvic and core muscles due to having them cut and stitched back together more than once. I have also suffered a lot with frequency-related cystitis and, if my bladder is full, I am conscious that I have to really concentrate to hold on to everything when I make a sudden involuntary movement.
So, when I stumbled upon a site that whose main purpose was to provide the means to eradicate this bane of so many women’s lives, I was intrigued.
Code – SNM8796
Promotion – 5% Off
Expires – 31st January 2010.
The products at Stress No More focus on health and wellbeing, with particular emphasis on the female pelvic floor but also addressing male incontinence. Because it’s not just confined to us ladies. For men of a certain age, prostate malfunction can cause similar problems.
The current featured weapon in this on-going battle is the new Kegel 8 machine. This is a bit like a TENS machine in that it exudes an electrical pulse onto the required muscle in order to stimulate it. Scientific studies have shown that this type of electrical stimulation of the pelvic floor muscles can improve the tone and performance of the area, thus reducing urge and frequency problems as well as helping with sensitivity and other sexual issues that can be adversely affected by the rise and fall of the different hormone levels of Menopause.
The Kegel 8 literature explains:
The aim of Kegel exercises is to restore muscle tone and strength to the pubococcygeus muscles (PC muscles) in order to prevent or reduce pelvic floor problems and to increase sexual satisfaction. Kegel exercises have been proven to help in the treatment of vaginal prolapse and preventing uterine prolapse in women, bladder weakness and poor sexual response.
Kegel exercises have been proven to be beneficial treating urinary and fecal incontinence in both men and women. Here in the UK they are known as PC Exercises or Pelvic Floor Exercises, and more recently ‘Kegels’ after Dr Arnold Kegel, a world-renowned gynaecologist.
When it’s in top shape the pubococcygeus (PC) muscle also known as the “love” muscle” helps a woman to have strong and lasting orgasms. But with age, pregnancy, and even lack of sex, this pelvic muscle can weaken. Women have long used their squeeze and release exercises Kegel exercises to help, but they’re not enough.
“Many women who do self-guided Kegels don’t improve because they don’t do them right” says Howard I Glazer Ph.D a NYC-based psychologist who specializes in pelvic-floor muscle diagnosis and rehabilitation.
The Kegel8 Pelvic Exerciser makes sure you exercise safely and efficiently, and results will be apparent in just a few weeks. The adage of “use it or lose it” is certainly true for women and their pelvic floor muscles, with Kegel8 improved pelvic health is easily achievable, and the benefits are amazing in all areas of a woman’s life.
Basically, it’s a small probe that can be inserted either vaginally or rectally. You should apply the special lubricant to aid insertion and conductivity. Then plug the leads into the main body of the machine and select your programme. There are eight different workouts for varying degrees of problem plus three do-it-youself plans.
I used the device each day over the Easter break whilst staying with Ruf and have continued to make the time daily upon my return. Normally the week following my visit would see me trying to fight off a bad attack of cystitis so I’m looking forward to discovering if the Tight and Tone can improve my muscle tone sufficiently to prevent this.
So far, I am very impressed and I can definitely feel some differences down there. Full explanation of using the device to follow next week and a proper progress report in May when, hopefully, the man himself will give his verdict during our next encounter.
In the meantime, Stress No More’s pelvic exercising products were mentioned on the Channel 4 programme ‘Embarrassing Bodies’ this week as part of their campaign to ‘Use it or Lose it’ vis a vis our pelvic floors. If you want to have a look at the programme online plus the reviews have a look here and skip to about 40 minutes. Basically, the electrically stimulating devices seemed to produce the best results and were the easiest to use.
If you do feel that you would like to purchase something from their large range of pelvic muscle stimulants, I would be really grateful if you could do so via my affiliate link.
For those of you in the US, this product is approved by the FDA but can only be sold there under prescription. However, many American women have ordered direct from StressNoMore in the UK, so you can still use this link. Postage is £20 by Swiftair for quick delivery.
Code – SNM8796
Promotion – 5% Off
Expires – 31st January 2010
For female Hormone replacement therapy has been one of the foremost means of healing pain from indications and diseases conveyed about by menopause. Throughout this remedy, estrogen, progesterone, and a mixture of other stationary constituents are injected into the woman to supply the much required grades of hormones lost because of the physiological situation of menopausal uniqueness.
When unnaturally organized hormones have verified incurable. Even if there was the identical agree of estrogen per se, the groundwork and artificial components to contain the hormones in its hardworking state may have verified too unsafe to swallow in some condition.
Bioidentical Hormones
Due to long research the Scientists have issued bioidentical hormones for treatment of hormone declines throughout menopause. This bioidentical hormone groundwork’s are normalized exact replicates of chemical symphony of those of humans. The effect thus is a less intrusive and promise infuriating equation that consigns the proposed reason of hormone replacement. There are furthermore arrive pharmaceuticals which arrange a more characterized and made-to-order bioidentical hormone equation to match the any person needs.
Though there are some setbacks for made-to-order bioidentical hormone groundwork’s for example non acceptance by the FDA, or possibly untested outcomes, researchers and investigators are hopeful that the restraint of having a made-to-order equation would have to be with lessening some other agencies or natural components utilized in the creation of the benchmark formula. This is to address the topic of some overexcited reactivity and allergic dangers by a couple of persons to some of the components.
If the bioidentical hormone therapy utilized is the identical one made and utilized by the body throughout premenopausal stage, it does not inevitably signify that the bioidentical treatment would be optimal for an indefinite time. Even routinely happening and made constituents in our bodies occasionally assist to a broad variety of difficulties, feeling swings, anomalousness’s, and irritations.
An ice massage is quick, free, easy to do, and it can provide significant pain relief for many types of pain. In a world of sophisticated medical care, a simple ice massage can still be one of the more effective, proven methods to treat a soreness.
Most episodes of pain are caused by muscle strain. Muscles can become inflamed and spasm, causing pain and significant stiffness.
While it sounds like a simple injury, a muscle strain can create a surprising amount of pain. In fact, this type of injury is one of the most common reasons people go to the emergency room. However, not much can be done for a strained muscle except for rest (e.g. for up to two days), pain relief medications, and ice and/or heat application.
How ice provides pain relief
Ice can help provide relief for back pain in a number of ways, including:
Ice application slows the inflammation and swelling that occurs after injury. Most pain is accompanied by some type of inflammation, and addressing the inflammation helps reduce the pain.
Numbs sore tissues (providing pain relief like a local anesthetic)
Slows the nerve impulses in the area, which interrupts the pain-spasm reaction between the nerves
Decreases tissue damage
Ice is most effective if it is applied soon after the injury occurs. The cold makes the veins in the tissue contract, reducing circulation. Once the cold is removed, the veins overcompensate and dilate and blood rushes into the area. The blood brings with it the necessary nutrients to allow the injured muscles, ligaments and tendons to heal.
As with all pain relief treatments, there are some cautions with ice. Never apply ice directly to the skin. Instead, be sure that there is a protective barrier between the ice and skin, such as a towel. Additionally, ice should also not be used for patients who have rheumatoid arthritis, Raynaud’s Syndrome, cold allergic conditions, paralysis, or areas of impaired sensation.
I’ve always thought that optimism beats the heck out of pessimism?
Over 60 million American men and women suffer from insomnia and sleeplessness each year and recent studies have indicated that the cause may be largely attributed to an underlying hormonal imbalance.
I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about DHEA and how it’s been coined as the “Mother of all Hormones,” but what exactly is DHEA? Where does it come from and what makes it so important?
Basically, it’s a small probe that can be inserted either vaginally or rectally. You should apply the special lubricant to aid insertion and conductivity. Then plug the leads into the main body of the machine and select your programme. There are eight different workouts for varying degrees of problem plus three do-it-youself plans.
